


out of the ashes

by Sashenka



Category: Cinderella (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-05 02:57:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1088786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sashenka/pseuds/Sashenka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After she loses everything, Cinderella starts again, helped by two mice and a rescued prince.</p>
            </blockquote>





	out of the ashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greenbirds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/gifts).



> I would never have thought of a postapocalyptic Cinderella on my own, so thank you for the prompt. :) I hope you enjoy, and have a wonderful Yuletide!

~//~

When the tornado hit, Cinderella was at the bottom of the garden well, scrubbing the stones until they glistened. The stones had hardly been grubby in the first place, but her stepmother strongly disliked seeing her idle, so Cinderella had long ago come up with a list of chores that kept her occupied but safely out of her stepmother’s sight. The well worked perfectly.

“What was that?” Jaq asked, fearfully, after the horrible sounds above had passed. He and Gus had scurried up her sleeves. The feeling of terrified mice on her arms wasn’t the most comfortable, but Cinderella had been glad of them, as they cowered together in the well’s bucket.

“I don’t know,” Cinderella said, slowly, although she did. She’d read about a tornado once, in a book she’d snuck out of the library. (Only her stepmother read books, and if Cinderella was careful to only take books from high shelves, she never noticed they were missing.) “Let’s wait a while to make sure it’s over, and then go and see.”

~//~

She sucked in a deep breath, involuntarily, when her head cleared the side of the well. Next to her, Gus said something unintelligible.

The house was gone. Fragmentary pictures rushed at her: splintered beams and piles of bricks littering the yard - book pages by her feet, stripped from their binding - the outline of a shape under a pile of rubble ahead. 

She knew without picking through the rubble that everyone who had been inside the house was dead. Her stepmother. Her stepsisters. Bruno. Major. Lucifer.

“What we going to do?” Gus asked. His voice was small.

It pulled her out of the first blank nothingness, and she shook herself. She was alive. What would her father have done? 

“We’re going to walk,” she said, and started down what used to the path to their house, towards the outside world.

~//~

The village was destroyed. 

Cinderella walked through without looking too closely at the rubble. The ruins were eerily quiet, the only sound the shifting of debris. 

Perhaps the palace survived, she thought, lifting Gus and Jaq out of her pockets and letting them ride on her shoulders. It wasn’t like anyone would see them. 

She remembered the palace, from when she was a girl and her father had taken her. She remembered how majestic it was, how large and shiny and fabulous. She remembered the queen smiling down at her, and a owlish-looking little boy her own age, peeking out from behind his mother’s skirts. She remembered the bustle of the palace, all the servants tending their duties, and how strong it had looked. Surely there would be people there.

~//~

It was a long walk to the palace, and nearly night by the time she reached it.

Or what was left of it.

Cinderella sat on a pile of flung brick and stared up at the stars. 

Eventually, Jaq and Gus came scurrying back to her to tell her that they’d found some carrots. The tornado had pulled them right out of the ground, scattering them about like so many feathers. She ate one, numbly, still trying to process what had happened, still trying to understand a day that had begun at the bottom of a well and had ended sitting on the ruins of a palace.

“I guess we go over the hills,” she told Jaq and Gus at last. “I’ll try to find some food in the morning, and then we’ll keep walking. It can’t have lasted forever. We’ll find somewhere.”

In the silence after that pronouncement, she at last heard the banging.

~//~

The banging came from under a pile of debris, but after picking her way carefully across the destruction site, Cinderella lost no time in beginning to shift the pile. Had she been one of her stepsisters, she doubted she would have been able to, but these years of servitude had given her a good set of muscles. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to move heavy loads, nor the first time she’d ignored splinters in her hands to finish a job.

Finally the job was done, and she stared down at what she’d uncovered. It was a door, a massive door of what looked like steel, with a heavy bar across it. For a moment, she wasn’t sure – what could linger behind a door like that? But then she laughed at herself, just a little, the sound harsh in the twilight air. 

She lifted the bar, and pulled on the handle, even as the person behind it heaved up with all their might.

“What took you so long?” the man on the other side started, indignantly, and then caught sight of the devastation behind her.

~//~

She gave him one of her carrots. Eventually, it helped.

“What happened?” he said, finally, his voice as numb as her brain had felt, all this interminable day.

She tucked herself closer to the fire he’d started, building a pile of splintered wood and mumbling some words at it. He must have magic like her fairy godmother, she thought, remembering vaguely a smiling plump woman who’d appeared a few times when she was a girl. “A tornado,” she said, and left it at that.

When the dark covered the ruins, and all they could see was the fire and each other, he seemed to relax, the tension draining out of his body. She noted it, and warned herself to expect the despair that would no doubt return with the dawn. This man – more of a boy, really – had obviously been raised to privilege; his clothes, though oddly singed at the wrists, were rich and pompous, and no servant would have ever had the hours needed to perfect that hairdo.

“I was practicing my magic,” he said, staring into the fire. “The Duke built that basement for me a year ago, after I nearly burnt down half a wing. It’s designed to withstand anything I throw at it.” He smiled, ruefully, memory for an instant crowding out reality, and Cinderella thought he had quite a handsome face, when he was smiling. “Some people’s magical mishaps manifest as crocodiles. Or kittens.” 

Jaq and Gus shifted uneasily at the mention of cats, but the boy barely seemed to notice them. When everything you’ve ever known is reduced to a pile of smoking rubbish, Cinderella supposed that a pair of talking mice was a little thing to accept. 

“Mine have always been pyrotechnics,” the boy finished, dreamily.

“Not tornados?” she asked, just to be sure.

He looked at her, properly looked for the first time. “No,” he said. The smile this time was tiny, sad; Cinderella didn’t like it. “Not tornados.”

~//~

They couldn’t sleep. They didn’t talk about it. They just sat by the fire, watching it burn down. Ever so often one of them put a new splinter of wood on.

Eventually the quiet was too much for Cinderella, too oppressive in this shattered dark. She began to talk. She told him about Lucifer and the mice, about Bruno, about Major. She told him about sneaking books out of the library to read in her room in the early morning hours, about the adventures she’d had with her father, about writing her own songs.

He told her in return about his studies, his magic, his family. He told her about sliding down banisters and teasing the Duke, about the mother he hardly remembered. He told her about the father who wanted grandchildren, when he himself wanted to devote himself to his work. He told her about adventures and books and, finally, his voice shy, his dream of becoming the first Fairy Godfather.

“I wonder where my fairy godmother is,” she said, musingly, as the first light of dawn peeked up over the horizon. “I certainly need some help now.”

He shook his head. “They only come when you can’t possibly help yourself, when you absolutely need magical assistance. As long as you’re managing on your own – even badly – they stay away.” He shrugged his shoulders with an apologetic grimace. “They like to encourage self-reliance.”

 _Bugger self-reliance_ , Cinderella thought, looking around in the dawn light at the huddled remains of what had once been a palace. 

He must have seen her face. “Don’t worry,” he said, and reached out a hand to cover hers. “We’ll be all right. A tornado this deadly is a terrible thing, but it’ll have died out eventually. If we keep walking, we’ll find our way out.”

“That’s what I told Jaq and Gus,” Cinderella said. “It doesn’t make it easier.”

His mouth tightened. “Yes. It doesn’t make it easier.”

~//~

“What do I call you?” she asked, after they roasted some carrots over the fire for breakfast. She wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t know who she was; someone who had a basement built in the royal palace for his magical hobby, and whose greatest teenage amusement appeared to have been teasing a Grand Duke, could only be one person. It was hard reconciling the bookishly handsome young man in front of her with the owlish little boy she’d once met, but she managed. “I’m not calling you Prince.”

He was sucking on a burnt finger, but he let it go and smiled. “I’m afraid my father named me Charming.” At her face, he laughed, and the sound made something in Cinderella’s heart unclench for the first time since she’d looked out of the well. “My mother called me Jack, though.”

“Jack,” she said, feeling the name in her mouth.

“And you are?” he prompted.

“Ella,” she said, dropping the cruel nickname of her teenage years in a single moment.

~//~

They were looking through the debris in an attempt to find a cellar with food in it, when Ella stopped short.

Jack, who was finding it hard to get his bearings without the landmarks he knew so well, turned around. “What is it?”

“Jack,” Ella said slowly, “do only fairy godmothers have magic?”

Jack crossed his arms. “There’s no gender barrier. Most people, like my father, think it’s women’s work, but I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a fairy godfather…”

Ella stopped him. “That’s not what I mean.” She took a deep breath. “Could someone use magic for evil?”

He wasn’t stupid. He might have nearly burned down the castle when he was thirteen and teaching himself how to transform a teacup, but he wasn’t stupid. “The tornado?”

“Could it have been magic?”

He looked around them at the debris as if seeing it for the first time. “It does seem to have been a bigger tornado than any I’ve ever heard of.”

“If it’s magic,” Ella said, “what do we do?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said the air next to her elbow.

Jack jumped, tripped over a brick, and sat down hard.

Ella’s fairy godmother popped into existence and beamed at them both. (Jack said a rather naughty word, but whether from tripping or from the sudden appearance of a fairy, Ella wasn’t entirely sure.) “Hello, children.”

~//~

It was the stuff of adventure stories. Ella had read bookshelves full of tales like this as a child – a daring band going on a quest to defeat an evil sorcerer. She’d gasped at the narrow escapes, loved the brave swashbucklers, and longed for happy endings.

The adventure stories never started with everything the heroes had ever known lying in waste at their feet.

They also never included the swashbuckling prince learning how to use location magic to find a root cellar, a plump fairy godmother at his elbow shaking her head at his wand technique, and two crotchety talking mice who were beginning to talk darkly of mutiny if they didn’t find cheese soon.

There was an evil sorcerer, though, off on a far-away mountain. That much was true. And the princess (well, prince in this case) _had_ had to be rescued, even if only from a magical basement instead of a tower (and if by a scullery maid instead of a dashing prince).

Ella looked back at the valley. It was going to be a long, hard path. Jack had to learn enough magic to defeat the sorcerer, because her fairy godmother couldn’t leave the kingdom. Ella had to learn how to swordfight, because the evil sorcerer would probably have a legion of minions she’d have to distract while Jack went after the sorcerer himself. Jaq and Gus had to learn how to be spies, so that she and Jack could send them into the sorcerer’s walls for reconnaissance purposes. They all had to learn… oh so many things.

But for the first time since she’d seen the ruins of her house, Ella felt like it might – possibly, just possibly – not be entirely hopeless.

And that, she thought, hurrying her steps to catch up with her fairy godmother and Jack, was almost a happy beginning.

~//~


End file.
